What's New
BY RadioToday Network June 25, 2026
What's New December 12, 2024
Duncan Campbell: “We just have to get Melbourne falling in love with Kyle & Jackie O”
Reporter
The Kyle & Jackie O Show is a great show, Duncan Campbell insists. A great, strong show … which lost its way.
“We just have to get Melbourne falling in love with them, that’s all,” says ARN’s Chief Content Officer, still doggedly optimistic about the outlook for 2025, despite the Sydney duo continuing their ratings slide down south.
GfK Survey 8 saw the KIIS pair drop 0.1 to a share of 5.0 in Melbourne Breakfast, with a cume loss of 24,000.
Ironically, Nova’s Jase & Lauren – the Breakfast show which made way for them – not only maintained top spot among the FM stations, its share is now more than double that of Kyle & Jackie O.
Speaking with our sister publication RadioInfo post-survey, Campbell notes that Kyle & Jackie O continue to have a strong following in Sydney.
Melbourne, though, still isn’t budging. Campbell is the first to admit they’ve got their work cut out.
“I believe we can turn it around. We have to make sure that the content on the show is the content that we’ve heard the last four to six weeks before they took a break. The show was much stronger then, more reflective of the core DNA of that show.”
Once again, Campbell emphasises that the explicit sexual content has been removed.
“So you’re getting to hear Kyle & Jackie O as they should be heard, really. We need to make sure we maintain that next year with very consistent, strong shows.”
“And then we need to market to the lapsed cume to resample. That’s the challenge, because once perceptions are formed, normally it’s very difficult to change.”
“They ARE a great show. They’ve lost their way a little bit with their sexual content at the beginning of the year, but they’re back on track now.”
“We also have to get Jackie and Kyle down to Melbourne more often,” says Campbell. “That’s a given.”
It will be a slow build, he says. But it’s a build, nonetheless.
Campbell also says the local media needs to be turned to their favour.
“The media, they obviously influence diary keepers. If people feel there’s a bit of a herd mentality going on, then people will just tick the opposition rather than us, if there’s an anti-media viewpoint being put forward.”
Will tweaking the content for Melbourne listeners have a detrimental effect on the show’s Sydney audience, though?
“I don’t think so,” says Campbell.
“The Sydney relationship with the show is much different to Melbourne. It’s like a best friend relationship in Sydney, and you forgive your best friend a lot of things, right? But when your best friend stops annoying you – they stop doing something – you don’t all of a sudden not become friends anymore. You actually enjoy their content even more.”
“The explicit sexual content was not ‘the show.’ It was a small part of the show, but it was what stuck out and got traction with the media.”
Among the highlights for ARN this book was Melbourne station Gold 104.3’s healthy 1.2 million cume.
“We know why Gold has not had a strong year this year. It was because we didn’t market the station this year. They’ll be back next year,” says Campbell, who also feels the rebrand of Sydney’s WSFM will be a positive change.
“What that will do is re-energise that station and it will give us some top of mind awareness, which we lack with WS … and remove any baggage associated with that brand over recent years.”
Smooth FM remains a key challenge for ARN in Sydney.
“Smooth is a mood-based format and it’s very well put together by Peter Clay and his team. They do some very effective marketing.”
But for now, Kyle & Jackie O’s Melbourne future remains very much a work in progress.
Related news
What's New
BY Sarah Patterson June 25, 2026
Duncan, you’ve lost. Accept it and move on.
“More often” implies they’ve been there since they started. They haven’t.
Also going to centre court at the tennis or a corporate box at the F1 isn’t that relatable to people in Melton and Narre Warren who might actually listening to the radio.
Kyle is a King in Western Sydney. They need to hit the those places in Melbourne where listeners actually live.
how many staff will be on the chopping block until the only people left at ARN are K&J.
how many staff will be on the chopping block before ARN is left with just Kyle & Jackie? The ego on this lot to not own up they made a mistake and to keep doubling down is just ridiculous. Who runs a business like this???
If they really think that they’re worth as much as they’re being paid, I think ARN first need to focus on getting Sydney to fall in love again with Kyle and Jackie before worrying about any other cities…
How can he defend jokes about incest and masturbating in disabled toilets. Shame
I just have to get my child to fall in love with brussel sprouts
Never gonna happen
Can I bonkers or something? Melbourne will never fall in love with Kyle.
“…lost their way with their sexual content!”
Hahahahaha, that is a weak line to hear from a programming exec. Fair dinkum, the way they bend over to a show themed in a way they have no control over is laughable.
If you *know* a show has lost its way, haul it the hell in before it festers!
Radioinfo (who had the original interview) missed, or didn’t have the spine, asking the hard question…
Duncan, what would you like to say to the 30-50 ARN who are (reportedly) now, or will soon be, without a job due to your decision to hand out such a large contract to Kyle and Jackie, which in the short-term has backfired?
Delulu. MFW Facebook page transcribes the show, sexual content abhorrent as of this week. Shame on all involved.
Is this a parody. So Duncan Campbell is happy with a show that mocks the disabled and makes jokes about incest?
I sense of a touch of Déjà vu about this last survey of year.
You’ll recall last year KIIS 101.1 axed Jase & Lauren just as their ratings performance hit highest peak for 101.1 (across its many station brands & breakfast line-ups) in decades.
Now, just as WSFM prepares to shed itself of a long-standing Sydney radio brand, ratings slip a significant margin behind Sydney’s Smooth.
It’s not clear cut whether a station needs a local name as its brand as much as in the past. So much so, one station – Triple M GOLD 92.5 – settled for something in-between.
Worst case for WS is that a too-significant portion of the affinity listeners have with it is with the heritage of 2WS & the change does not prove as subtle as ARN hope.
That was the experience of TT-FM in Melbourne all those years ago.
Though always aligned to 2UW or MIX 106.5 in those early days, TT enjoyed a greater freedom to be a distictly local Melbourne identity. When that success peaked, TT did top the ratings about this time 30 years ago.
Increasingly, networks persist with how to network. They find many ways to deliver it while still (sometimes very narrowly) safeguarding what radio is nothing if not – live & local presence.
Unfortunately, a once great station that is 101.1 in Melbourne is networking’s greatest victim.
My prediction – it needs more than a local breakfast show. It needs to be as untethered from the Sydney station as it takes to recreate a presence.
To think ARN predicted giving away big splurges of cash was all it would take in 2024. Now they pin their hopes on providing Kyle & Jackie O a Myki card each in 2025 (on the bright side, those cost less money)
Duncan Copperfield then said,
“For my next trick, I’ll nail jelly to the ceiling “.
Duncan talks about baggage, sounds like there are more job losses to come and when your on a downhill slide let’s blame the audience for not listening to a networked station that has no firm grounding in Melbourne.
WSFM promo sounded light the voice over guy said : WS is blowing up in 2025…..this could be the greatest downfall in radio history…..time will tell.
@Neil Alexander – the promo says “glowing up” NOT “blowing up”
@FYI….. Yes I do know the promo is glowing up, unfortunately when it started it sounded like blowing up…..glowing or blowing it’s a dumb move.
Lol, I think things work differently up there “you’re friends are terrible people, but stick it out with them, they might start treating you and everyone else nicely soon”
When it comes to broadcasting, I think Melbourne needs something with a little more substance, but hasn’t it always?
Duncan Campbell is dreaming about Melbourne audience falling in love with those 2 foul mouthed ” jocks”and their HUGE egos
It will never happen and time he faces the fact it’s been a huge failure
And needs to pull them into line maybe have a 1 minute delay in Melbourne
The decision to bring in Kyle and Jackie O reminds me of when HSV 7 was taken over by the powers that be in Sydney in 1987. Mal Walden was sacked, the local identity went, and ratings plummeted. A distinctly Melbourne brand (HSV being the first TV station in the city) went the way of networking.
And so here we are, with a duo that isn’t rating, a shred of research would have confirmed that Kyle ain’t for Melbourne radio breaky style, and how many good radio people have been sacrificed on the alter of that mega contract?
But we’ll fall in love with them? I wonder if people did give them a go – and left; or like me, whose breakfast radio has been fixed to AW since the Lawyers Guns and Money days and would never listen to Kyle – and who also – like me – have dipped into NOVA to see what the fuss is about – oh, and liked Jase and Lauren and Clint.
Perhaps many Melbourne listeners – if they are still undecided about Kyle – stop and wonder why he doesn’t want to come and visit or make an effort to get to know the city he’s broadcasting into – and then say to themselves ‘if he can’t be bothered with my city, then why should I be bothered with giving him my time to listen?’.
As for the the media needs to be onside claims? Yes, there’s probably that – but that goes to understanding – or wanting to understand – context, culture, and an attitude of many Victorians that they don’t like being foisted a show on to them by management in Sydney.
As anyone who remembers HSV 7 and Mal Walden (and TT-FM as noted in the comments) might have known….
Is Duncan Campbell for real ?
How can he put his name to this trash.
And it’s too late to change. The horse has bolted
He keeps repeating ‘explicit sexual content’. He never gives a single example of what else they do, what makes the show special, why someone should listen. I honestly think they’ve all lost their way very badly. It makes me realise just how good Howard Stern was in the 90s.
Fat chance….vulgar pair of irrelevant no bodies.
Campbell has a good future as an advisor for the Democrats in the USA if it turns to shit here! Which is a forgone conclusion!
LOL.
To quote the castle “tell him he’s dreaming”
Sydney will too wake up to the realisation that there’s far better radio hosts to be listening to then these two irrelevant, disgraceful duo. Keep watching the slide – it goes down.